Earlier, at the suggestion of my friend Buzz Dixon, I linked to an article by Joe Lieberman about how things ain't so hopeless in Iraq. Now, at the suggestion of my friend Gordon Kent, I link to an article by Glenn Greenwald about how things ain't so honest with Joe Lieberman. The latter is less about Iraq than it is about the ongoing disingenuousness of the Senator from Connecticut but it's not a bad rebuttal.
What I'd love to find, and I mean this, is a solid "how we'll win in Iraq" article by someone who hasn't changed their rationales more often than their boxer shorts or panty-liners. My problem with a lot of the pro-war advocates is that they keep futzing with the rules, moving the goalposts each time they fail to complete a pass. It's like when Cheney said that the British troop withdrawal was a marker of success. You know that if Great Britain had pledged not to withdraw those troops, he would have said that was a marker of success. No matter what happens, they say that it's what's supposed to happen. The claim is made that everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for six months. And then when things are worse in six months, they'll be saying everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for another six months, followed by another six months and then another and another.
If the advocates of the Bush plan want Americans to believe that success is attainable in Iraq and thereabouts, they need to offer a direct, example-filled definition of what will constitute success. But they don't seem to want to do that because that would create a firm definition of failure and they can't have that. It's too hard to wriggle out of those when they come to pass.
Seriously: If anyone can point me to an article that says that defines success in Iraq without saying something like, "Success is when we win and they lose," please do. What turned me against this war was that I've never understood what it was supposed to accomplish and that its advocates have been so deliberately vague about how we'd know when that was or wasn't happening.